Navigation

Okay, let's talk a little bit about navigation. There are three success criteria on navigation that are important. Let's start with two, four, five multiple ways, double A success criterion.

And basically says that there is more than one way to locate a web page within a set of web pages, except where the web page is the result of or step in process.

So if you have step one, step two, step three, and step two, you only come through step one, then this is accepted.

But any other page on the website, you need to have at least more than one way.

And usually that is search. You have a search on your page. Often it can be a sitemap. And it's totally also valid if there are multiple pages on the page. So for example, you can go from your homepage to your about page. And also you can go from your homepage to the news page and then to the about page.

these would consist as two different ways to get to a page.

So this is, I think, in the general sense, a pretty no-brainer

because you want your pages to be found.

So I think I've never failed this in my experience as a tester.

The second success criterion is location, location, location. AAA success criteria:

information about the user's location within a set of web pages is available. Now this is

basically a requirement for breadcrumb in AAA. Most content-heavy web pages have that,

So it's not a big deal, also it's AAA, so it's not that bad.

And then we have 3.2.3, consistent navigation, and this is probably the most complicated

navigation success criteria, success criteria even. And it says navigational mechanisms that

are repeated on multiple web pages within a set of web pages occur in the same relative order,

each time they are repeated, unless a change is initiated by the user. Now, what does that mean?

It means that on this page, Planning and Managing Web Accessibility, this site navigation is always

after the breadcrumb navigation and before the main content. And then if I go to sustain,

this site navigation is always between the breadcrumb navigation and the main content.

If the sidebar does not exist, the rest that does exist needs to be in the same relative order.

It's a little bit complicated to understand, but basically you don't want to have like your

main navigation sometimes at the top, even though it's visually at the bottom or something like

that. You want to have everything in a nice way layout that it makes sense for you to explore.

So that's multiple ways. It's not multiple ways. That is consistent navigation. It's double A

criterion and I think it's pretty easy to achieve and most websites do a good job. However, you have

to take a look into the code if you have a website that is built with WYSIWYG tools. So basically

where people just drag and drop stuff in and arrange it and it's like positioned, then this

might be an issue, but it's super rare.